Rossnowlagh's Neil Britton among the Prowler Big Wave Riders

Irish Times 4 Dec 2010 Rossnowlagh's Neil Britton was among Prowler big wave riders

SURFING: Ireland – frozen, broken, forsaken Ireland – finds herself at the centre of an international Gold Rush of Big Wave riding. Meet the prospectors, writes KEITH DUGGAN 

“If I only scrape a livin’, at least
it’s a livin’ worth scraping.”
– Mickey Smith, Dark Side of the Lens.
‘I WAS at the point where I was saying goodbye,” Paul O’Kane says of the sensation of going under and discovering the wave does not want to let you up again. This was in the Atlantic, just off the Clare coast on a late afternoon at Christmas 2008. Some metres above him, on the surface of the water, O’Kane had friends, experienced watermen all. But for those few seconds they might as well have been in a different world.
O’Kane was 48 and he had been tumbling through surf since his boyhood in the Sydney suburb of Bondi. Controlling his breathing has always been of paramount importance to him: he is asthmatic. In Australia, all swim teams must reserve one place for asthmatic athletes, a stipulation invoked after the rambunctious Dawn Fraser stormed through world swimming in the 1960s despite her affliction.
So O’Kane practised breathing as a swimmer and, later, as a surfer, and when he was pulled under on this afternoon he didn’t panic. Somehow he knew he had been swept in under the broad coastal shelf that creates the Aileen’s wave and he waited for the churning water to release him upwards. But he was powerless.
On the water, a jet-ski was trying to get close to where he had been snatched by the wave as it imploded around him – think of a building collapsing – and 700 feet above on the Cliffs of Moher others scanned the beery water.
They celebrate this place and respect its beauty, and then suddenly, when something like this happens, it all turns a shade darker and vengeful.
Every so often the truth which they all like to block out – that they are little more than children when pitted against tonnes of water bearing down at the wrong time – establishes itself as formidably as the cliffs which loom over Ireland’s most celebrated wave. Waves of Consequence, they call them, for self-explanatory reasons. Someone counted the seconds during which O’Kane was under.
“I was told I was under for 22 seconds but it felt like minutes to me,” O’Kane recalled this week. “I had gone past the stage where I could no longer hold my breath and past the stage where I was thinking, ‘right, I need air now’ to where I was thinking, ‘maybe I should just open my mouth and breathe what is there’. Water, I suppose. I don’t know if I would have blacked out or if that is what happens.
“And thankfully I never had to find out because right then I got back up. But it was terrifying. And it took me about two full years to get my confidence back.”
When photographs of the surfing crew that rode the Prowlers wave off the Sligo coast made international news a few weeks ago, O’Kane was out there, manning the jet-ski and ensuring that the surfers – led by Richie Fitzgerald and Andrew Cotton – merged with the wave at sufficient speed and at the correct angles. The magnificence of the waves and the quality of the photographs marked another triumph in the nouveau practice of Big Wave surfing in Ireland.
The easy assumption to make is that Big Wave hunting is a mad-cap dash to big foam by thrill seekers on fibreglass. But there is a forensic approach to the whole business which borders on geeky. Almost all serious surfers are like amateur meteorologists, poring over internet forecasts several times a day. And everything that precedes the few immortal seconds of gliding on the wave is pure monotony and preparation.
The drudgery of getting sealed up in wet gear sufficient to withstand the aching chill of Irish winter waters is an inescapable necessity. Irish big waves are not like those in Tahiti, to be enjoyed from a sun chair with a beer in hand. These waves are remote, magisterial and inhospitable. And, as the saying goes, they are cold as fuck.
Prowlers can just about be seen from Classie Bawn, Lord Mountbatten’s old pile in Mullaghmore. “Well, on a clear day,” laughs Neil Britton, who, along with Fitzgerald, Mikee Hamilton and Aaron Pierce was among the first expedition to ride the great wave in April 2009 and to christen it Prowlers. Local surfers had been aware of it for years, but it seemed so wild and so far off the coast that the idea of riding it fell somewhere between foolhardy and quixotic.
They had been schooled by O’Kane in the art of using a jet-ski, of placing the surfer safely into the mouth of the wave, of how best to get out of its path if things go wrong; of always being safe. They waited until the weather seemed negotiable – a day of big waves but with no wind. “Same as water-skiing. If you hit choppy waves at speed, you come off,” Britton explains.
The swells reached about 30ft that afternoon. The night before, he couldn’t sleep. “Just the trepidation. And that hasn’t changed. It is always like that. But that day was incredible.”
THE BRITTON NAME is synonymous with Irish surfing; his father and uncles became the pioneers of the sport when growing up in the family business and Donegal institution, The Sandhouse Hotel in Rossnowlagh. In the 1980s and even in 1990s surfing was largely a localised, fringe activity in Bundoran and Rossnowlagh, but over the last 10 years, it has become a phenomenally popular pastime.
For seasoned surfers like Fitzgerald and Britton, it has become a way of life: both have established surf schools, and other such enterprises now dot the west coastline. Britton runs Fin McCool’s in Rossnowlagh from Easter through to Christmas, something he could not have foreseen when he started out surfing. For a while, he presumed that the surge in popularity was just another vogue whim of a generation of young Irish people looking for new ways to spend endless money.
“But since the downturn, the classes are still popular. Guys coming in and buying all the labels and gear – that has stopped. But people are still coming back. Because once you have your board and your gear, the water is free. It is there. And you know, not everyone finds that they are good at it, but they all have fun.”
It is only in the last few years that Britton has been drawn to big waves. “Apart from anything else, it was always too expensive. Jet-skis and that.” He took inspiration from noting what surfers like Fergal Smith and Mickey Smith (no relation) have been doing down in Clare over the past few years. Fergal Smith is a 22-year-old from Mayo whose pursuit of big waves has merited international attention. He doesn’t consider himself obsessive in his relationship with the ocean but, at the very least, he is caught up in a fascination that he does not expect to end.
His parents run an organic farm near Westport and tending to crops meant that all summer holidays had to be relatively local. One summer, on Achill Island, his father bought a surfboard for 30 quid. Eventually, his older brother gave him a go. That was it. By Leaving Cert, Smith told his parents he didn’t want to go on to college. Instead, he asked for a loan to get himself started in surfing. He has long since paid it back.
He was drawn to big wave surfing and possessed the combination of fearlessness and skill and good judgment that has enabled him to make a living out of it through sponsorship and occasional magazine trips. In summers, he moves through exotic sounding surf locations – Tahiti, etc – but it is the Irish winters, when he gets to live the ascetic surfing life in surf water which is often unpopulated, he yearns for.
“Crowds aren’t for me,” he says apologetically the day we meet. He has the sallow skin of an outdoorsman and is slight and athletic. “Even walking down Shop Street in Galway is too much.”
Two years ago, he moved down to Clare so he could be close to the Aileen’s wave. You will find him there most days when there is a swell. On the morning we met, he had gone for physiotherapy for busted discs in his neck, and for the first time in weeks the water off the Clare coast was utterly placid. It was a weird day though: at Spanish Point, where Smith’s van was parked, the heaviest fog had fallen. But a few miles away at the Cliffs of Moher you could see up as far as Connemara. Smith gave a succinct meteorological explanation for why this was so on the drive over.
The path which the surfers use to get down to the Aileen’s wave is some distance past the Visitors Centre at the Cliffs of Moher. It involves Wellington boots, vaults over several gates, a trudge through exceedingly muddy fields past unimpressed cows and the goodwill of the landowner who turns a blind eye when he sees wetsuited silhouettes lugging surfboards across his fields. A low stone wall marks the beginning of the headland from where the view is staggeringly and forbiddingly beautiful. At the edge, the drop down is sheer and the only way to the base of Moher is on a goat’s trail which zig-zags down the sheer, grassy cliffside. The path is narrow and don’t-look-down steep, but not that demanding: it just wouldn’t be a good idea to stumble.
“First time I saw this I was bricking it,” Smith says. “Now we just run up and down it.”
And they do that carrying surfboards, wetsuits, flippers and gear, day after day, often in rain. When we are standing at the bottom, he scans the water and points to where Aileen’s breaks.
“You paddle out right by the end of the cliff,” he says.
“See all those rocks sticking up? When there are waves they break, so you sneak out along the side where it is a bit calmer. As a big wave spot, it is very close to the shore. But it is legitimate. The wave isn’t sketchy. It breaks properly above the water. Thing is, you can get washed in and you end up in that bay over there. If you get sucked in, the waves are so big you can’t get out, so you have to leave your boards and just swim out and come back and get it when it is calmer. Or if the waves are too big, you get stuck there.
“But this place is amazing. Irish surfing is still really young and all these waves are here. There are not many people surfing them yet.
“What surfing is about, for me, is riding the wave really well – as deeply and as critically as possible – the way they should be ridden, and push the standards for people to start getting more in tune with learning and pushing what can be done on good waves. ’Cos, if you see Aileen’s in photos, there is not an end bit. It is like a cereal bowl shape, like a shaped piece of glass that curls perfectly around, and what that is is the power of 15 or 20 foot of water sucking up off the shelf. And it is all pulling over and trying to suck you up the face. So you are trying to surf down and across the wave at the same time.
“But once you get in the barrel, the wave wants to push you out. It is perfectly natural. You just have to hold on to that limbo state of, ‘will it hit you, will it not’. But it is a good wave, it will push you out.”
Aileen’s is a brand new wave that has been there for maybe a million years. Mickey Smith was living in Doolin when he first spied it in September 2005. It looked tantalisingly unreachable and he walked the headland for miles looking for a way down.
Eventually, they took a jet-ski over and were elated to notice the trail down the cliff. “I am sure fishermen always knew about the wave. But in terms of surfing, it was undiscovered,” he says.
Smith is a soft-spoken Cornish man but has been coming to Ireland since he was 15 and has lived in Clare for five years. Or, more accurately, he eats and sleeps in a house in Doolin: he lives for the water breaking under those towering cliffs.
“Didn’t have much choice the first time,” he says cheerfully of his first visit to Ireland. “I was about 15 walking to school one morning and some friends bundled me into their car. One of them had just passed his driving test and they wanted to go to Ireland to celebrate. I had to phone me Ma and tell her I wasn’t going to school, I was going to Ireland. We ended up in Doolin.”
Like Fergal Smith, Mickey is in thrall to the Irish coast. Dark Side of the Lens, his award-winning, ethereal short film about surfing in north Clare, is like a manifesto for the life he has chosen to live. He is a renowned bodyboarder and takes photographs and makes films. Sponsorship and publication fees bring some money in, but income can be unsteady and he throws most of it at the camera equipment he needs for his art. He lives simply and, when necessary, frugally.
“Life on the road is something that I was raised to embrace,” he says at the beginning of the Dark Side of the Lens, which might sound fanciful except that it is true. He has been roaming since his teenage years and there is no master plan – let alone pension plan – beyond surfing and capturing great images. Smith is 30 now and finds that he is becoming more, rather than less, intimidated by the scale and volume of the waves he captures on film. The way he sees and talks of the great waves make them seem like living creatures.
“I’m sort of dragged along now,” he protests unconvincingly. “But what Fergal is doing is on a level with the best big wave surfers in the world and to photograph that is wonderful.”
What Smith does demands perfectionism. He can spend hours drifting on the periphery of the huge breakers, holding his board in one hand and a heavy camera in the other, and still come away frozen and with no shot worth keeping.
Every so often the wave reminds him of who is who in this kingdom; he got caught the wrong side of a break last year and was smashed onto the reef below, breaking his arm, the humerus bone. He knows that when he is old he will pay for all the battering he has taken from the sea. They all will.
They all confess to being a tiny bit terrified every time they do this. But they can’t stop.
“I think I can keep going,” says Paul O’Kane, who celebrated turning 50 this year.
At Aileen’s they often stay in the water until the light has almost entirely faded. Then they drag the boards over the rocks and begin the hard climb back up the cliff and haul their boards across the darkening fields, shivering and exhausted. It is the antithesis of all the clichéd glamour which surfing supposedly represents.
And at the heart of it is a quiet refusal to conform to the normal rules and conventions; to live slightly beyond the reach of mainstream society. Standing at the bottom of Moher, it is not the dauntingly beautiful coast that overwhelms as much as the sense that what is happening up above does not really matter.
“Are you thinking about all that stuff – the banks and everything that is going on – at the moment down here?” Fergal Smith asks as we stand looking across the reef. He is pointing out where they keep a small emergency kit of food and clothing in case someone gets swept in and is caught by the tide.
“It is a different world. Mickey is classic for it. ‘What banks? What do you mean, banks?’ We are busy doing what we want to do. You can’t let other things drag you down. We were down here about three weeks ago – me, Dave Blount and Mickey. Me and Dave were paddling and Mickey was taking a few photos. The sun was going down and we couldn’t see one man-made building except for those two castles. And it felt pretty good.”
You would want to see Smith’s face when he is recalling this. He is so dazzled by this place and so respectful of what it brings him that you can’t help but think him lucky. Perhaps now more than ever, with Ireland frozen and the general mood clamorous and frightened, there is something heartening about the thought that right now, on this Siberian Saturday morning, a handful of Irish people scattered along the coast are waking up thinking of nothing beyond getting into the freezing Irish water to get pounded and, with luck, to glide along its kingly breaks for maybe 10 ephemeral seconds. At the very least, what they do invites you to pause for a second and enjoy the sights and sounds on the ragged edges of this island.
The danger involved in chasing big waves will always be there and they can all talk much too vividly about what it is like when those moving walls crash down you. “You are just spinning,” as Britton says. “One second you are being pulled backwards, then your knee is hitting your face, then you are spinning again. And you just have to hold on.”
But those thoughts – those moments – are quickly banished. “When I go out with those guys and I look at their faces,” Paul O’Kane says, “I know I can trust them absolutely.”
What big wave surfing comes down to is the most childish and purest form of exhilaration and escapism imaginable. What it is, for the few seconds the wave belongs to them, is a form of wealth few people can hope to achieve.
“I don’t feel like I am a crazy man or anything,” Fergal Smith says quietly. “It’s just, when I see a good wave, I am drawn to it. And when you get out there, when you are in the wave, it is pretty quiet. You are thinking of nothing else.”
And all the rest of it, the workaday world going on up and over the vast cliffs; just noise.
Pulling power: wave mystique and secrecy
AILEEN’S WAS first surfed by Mickey Smith, Rusty Long and John McCarthy and quickly earned Ireland the reputation as being a potential Gold Rush country for new waves. That it happens to exist under one of the most popular and breathtaking landmarks in the country added to its appeal.
“We are protective of it and you hate to see loads of goons coming down and trying to surf the wave, it is a bit daft, really,” Fergal Smith says.
“But when you see people interested in trying to surf the waves properly, it is amazing to watch. People do come down and reckon they will be able to do it. But it is very quickly stopped by themselves. ’Cos they go in there and they very quickly realise how far out of their depth they are. Even the top guys come over and after half an hour of trying to surf it they realise that it is beyond them, and they are not going to go on a suicide trip just to glorify their name. In heavy waves, it gets sorted out pretty quickly.
“All the shit talk that goes on in the land means nothing once they are right there face-to-face with a really heavy wave. It is up to you then whether you are going to ride the wave or not.”
The secrecy surrounding the exact whereabouts of the Prowlers wave is half in fun but fully in earnest. The first group to surf it last year did want to keep it to themselves, partly for mischief and partly because they had gone to the trouble of discovering it. But most surfers who wanted to find it could do so.
“It’s not that big a secret,” Neil Britton says. “Lots of people know where it is. If anyone came to surf it and asked where it is, we would tell them.
“One of the reasons behind it is to stop people who may not have the experience going out there and trying it and getting into trouble.”
The weather conditions that led to the huge waves at the break last month generated international publicity for surfing – as well as tourism – and invites speculation that there are similar such waves breaking around the Irish coast that have yet to be discovered.
Photographer Mickey Smith describes Evening Cliffs , the photograph. “This was taken late one afternoon last year during the January snow. I wanted to try to convey how surreal and genuinely mind-blowing the experience of surfing under the Cliffs of Moher can be, especially in winter. That time of year the evening light sets the cliffs glowing and turns the ocean a vivid green against the sunset. The only way I could figure out how to do that, though, was to get among the waves and swim around under the waves with my fish-eye lens, in an attempt to document the breaking waves as well as the cliff line at the same time. As usual, I ended up swimming around for a fair few hours waiting patiently in the deep freeze, dodging waves, holding my position on the reef, and hoping for the best. Finally, Fergal Smith made the drop and gracefully rode underneath the lipline of the wave breaking over him under the silent stare of Moher’s Coliseum.”